


hometown

by Khrysaetos



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Related, Dathomir (Star Wars), Festivals, Gen, I got this from a dream I don't make the rules, Nightbrothers, Short One Shot, Zabraks (Star Wars), no specific point in Maul's timeline, pardon my sleep brain's lack of consistency, probably, where we're from we're no one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:40:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23859946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khrysaetos/pseuds/Khrysaetos
Summary: If you don't remember it, is it still home?Maul returns to Dathomir for the first time, briefly, alone.
Kudos: 22
Collections: Maul





	hometown

**Author's Note:**

> This morning I had a dream. Here it is.

Red sunlight dimmed the planet, softening it into a constant twilight. It was like the glow that lit the undersides of heavy clouds on Mustafar, but gentler, cleaner. Here it was like a sunset following on the tail of a thunderstorm. The sky washed clean, like a cut ruby.

A light breeze swayed the branches where Maul perched, watching the village at the bottom of the wooded slope. Every movement of a sentient on their small, mundane errands caught his gaze, and he would follow it until they were out of sight behind a tent or a rippling banner. New paths were being trampled in the deep wine-colored grass; it must have been the most activity the village had seen all season.

From a distance, the tents’ patterns were hard to make out, but the colors were terribly bright. Maul’s brain had adjusted to the planet’s altered colors under its crimson sun, and what might have looked uniformly reddish in a holovid now shimmered through the color spectrum. Yellow, bright like wildflowers, blue like an oxygen-rich sky, the soft white of seeding trees that coated the ground of some far-off moons in the summer months. Tents and flags and strings of tiny fluttering banners: all of it was bursting from a central point, dark itself but haloed in color: a massive pyre, ready for burning. Dry plant matter was piled carefully far above the highest tent-poles, and Maul could hear the echoing _thwack_ as logs were split, then added to the stack.

The afternoon was wearing on. Maul could only assume the bonfire would be lit as darkness fell.

Maybe it would have been wise to keep to the forest until night. It would have been the patient thing; what Sidious would have wanted. And that was the thought that stirred Maul from his perch. He landed quietly in the deep forest dirt, full of rotting leaves and soft fungi, the way he might have before his feet were heavy durasteel and belied his every step.

Sidious must be on his trail. Maul’s time was running out along with the daylight. His training told him – stay invisible, stay silent, choke out any spark of life that might give you away. But this was _his_ mission now. His own, not his one-time Master’s. Come back to Dathomir, if only for a day.

It must be just the knowledge that he was born here that made the planet seem somehow familiar. Perhaps Maul had dreamed about it, long ago, before sleep was no longer an escape for him and only a moment of vulnerability. The ancient, rainy smell of the woods was a strange kind of frustrating. Did he really remember it, deep in his bones, from when he was too small to even walk? Or was he just hoping he did?

It pushed him to stalk quicker, as fast as he could without betraying his presence. Small creatures rustled away as he passed, but the sounds of sentient activity that echoed through the trees from the village had to drown any alarm calls the wildlife might send up. Smoke reached him now, where he padded below the treetops. It smelled like food – not the bonfire, not yet. Meat roasting, and herbs being burnt like incense.

Maul slowed, unconsciously, as the shadow of the wood began to break up into patches, letting sunlight through. There was an open field between where the forest ended and the village began, teeming with wildflowers, and roamed by small groups of sentients. He was close enough now to make them out: Zabrak, most with horns trimmed short, and colored in varying shades of flame.

It gave him pause. He’d left behind the shrouding Sith cloak in his rush to escape Coruscant, and up till now had been considering it a loss. Even in the Galactic center, Maul turned heads; if someone knew what he was – a Nightbrother born – they stared, and if they didn’t know what he was, they still stared. But here, as Maul stood still in the shade of the forest’s edge, he watched a trio of Zabrak trudging through the wildflowers, and two were orange like a Tatooinian sunset, and one was nearly red.

He wanted to stop and stare at each passerby. Every one had a different pattern, bilaterally mirrored, and for a moment Maul glanced down at his own hands. He knew the inky patterns weren’t tattoos, not the traditional kind. The lines healed too cleanly after injury for that. But after only a second he clenched both hands, and set off across the field, for once camouflaged in his own skin.

The one or two Zabrak that crossed paths with him, carrying burdens or wandering idly, got out of his way – he walked with a purpose – but none gave him a second glance. It was strange. Like being... invisible. Was this how Sidious felt, walking unremarkable among the crowds of Coruscant?

A body arced through the air, before and above Maul, just as he reached the flock of tents. He pulled up short, took a step back, before another one flew in the opposite direction of the first and he recognized the pattern: it was an act, a practiced dance of acrobatics. A symmetrical set of Zabrak flipped back and forth over the grassy aisle. Streamers fluttered from their horns, not long enough to trip them up, but bright against their patterned skin. Maul’s surprise only lasted for a heartbeat before it settled into a startled scorn. He had been doing such exercises since he was knee-high to a B1. These men were fully grown. He stalked between them, not even blinking as they soared, twisting, just over his horns. For a moment he wanted to look back. Even as a child, he could have done what they did. He could have fit right into their ranks.

The looming bonfire was like a compass star above the tents. Maul could see it clearly, but he couldn’t leap and climb over the billowing cloth the way he would through a ferrocrete city. Instead he had to navigate the maze of color and busy sentients, careful not to step on any toes. It was indirect, inefficient, but somehow the restlessness that threatened to build up in his chest couldn’t gain any footing. His mission here, today, was freeform; the goal was fluid, expansive. Maul didn’t know how it would be completed, but he would know when it was. For the moment, all he could do was take it in. Watch and listen, and just _be –_

And the next Zabrak who crossed his path wouldn’t leave it. He made eye contact, stepping into Maul’s trajectory, and held out his hand. Maul sidestepped, then realized the being’s confusion and scrambled to salvage the interaction. The other Zabrak was offering a gift, and Maul took it, without looking closely, and silently returned the other’s cheerful goodbye (or was it a greeting?) with a nod. It was a flower chain, Maul realized as he looked down, made of the same small yellow blooms that covered the field around. The Zabrak had been adorned with them, hanging round his neck and draped over his horns. Maul held it looped over an open hand as he watched the other being go; the stranger would pause, once in a while, to offer the rings of flowers to anyone he passed without one.

Maul kept moving. His tunic had pockets, but the ring of flowers stayed clutched in one hand. Crumbled forgotten foliage wasn’t something Maul wanted in his clothes. The tents seemed to be arranged in crooked rings, butted up against one another. There was no clear path through without flinging aside hanging tapestries and disturbing the beings inside, and Maul growled under his breath. At this rate it would be night and the bonfire lit before he ever reached the center. And he hadn’t eaten since – when? Coruscant? The trip there? His mind reached for the lightsaber, on instinct. It would be so easy to slash through the flimsy tents, leap over the guywires. Take any food he wanted, just by flashing his teeth and grabbing the owner in a chokehold from ten meters away. But he _couldn’t_ do that.

Just in front of him, a pair of Zabrak emerged from a patterned tent, the door-flap falling shut behind them. A piece of their conversation floated to Maul through the busy air: “...until they light the fire. The earlier we arrive, the better seats...” Maul didn’t break stride, keeping them in the corner of his vision, changing his course to match.

He forgot them the second he straightened from ducking beneath a string of pennants, finding himself in an open ring that stretched almost as wide as the field surrounding the village. The unlit bonfire towered above it all, its shadow stretching like a ragged sundial across the tents. Sentients were seated around it in the trampled grass, singly and in small groups. Some were napping. For a moment, Maul considered joining them – taking a spot and just... waiting. The idea that if he sat still, another being like the flower-distributor might try and talk to him, kept him from settling. Instead he paced the wide ring of tents, around and around, somehow slower each revolution.

Maul asked no questions, and still he was gathering information, like a lake gathers rain. The varying voices of the Zabrak were all so different from his own. Their accents didn’t echo Coruscanti nobility the way Maul’s did; not nearly so restrained. The vocabulary was entirely different, too: it was still Galactic Basic, but wound through with idioms that meant nothing to him, and slang that might as well have been an alien language. Maul picked up scattered fragments of the Zabraks’ lives, and held them the way he held the ring of flowers – loosely, not sure what to do with them.

A sort of almost-despair welled in Maul’s lungs as he realized the sun had sunk below the ridge that the woods flowed down from. He wasn’t sure why. Wasn’t this what he had been waiting for? Twilight, so the bonfire could be lit. With the red glow of the sun gone, the valley seemed painted blue-green in its absence. But only for a moment. Then the burning arrows were fired, and the pyre billowed into light.

It held Maul’s gaze the way a star in a dark void would. The sound reached him only moments before the smell did. Sputtering, crackling, _snaps_ as sap boiled and burst – then a lungful of smoke. Not like the smog of Coruscant, or the sulfur of Lotho Minor. It smelled like a forest fire, without the fear.

It burned Maul’s eyes. The gentle wind carried sparks toward him, and the other Zabrak in the smoke’s path scurried around to the other side of the fire. Maul stood his ground, squinting hard, blinking away the tears that tried to wash away the ash. The pyre created its own wind now, hot and dry, lofting burning leaves.

He could feel the bonfire in the Force. Not as a mind or a life; just as brightness, destruction, rebirth, swirling slowly in his mind. He shut his eyes against the ash, and realized he was gripping the flowers tight enough to crush them and feel the moisture from the broken leaves on his fingertips.

Other beings passed by, in ones and twos and threes, skirting around Maul where he stood with his feet planted in the crushed grass. He felt the cold shadow as they passed between him and the fire, and then the burning heat again, before his skin had time to cool. Light night breezes threaded past his rear horns, but the ones just above his eyes burned in the radiant warmth. Urgency kept trying to prod at him: _what are you doing? Move. Chase. Act._ He was just _standing_ here.

And yet he knew this was why he’d come to Dathomir. Still he couldn’t put words to it, but he _knew_. So he stayed still as the sparks washed over him, floating into the night. He kept his eyes closed, listening with every sense, taking in all he could before it burnt out.


End file.
